I had an interesting morning - my boss, Suzanne Fortman, and Adele Goldberg - who needs no introduction - were here. Adele happened to be in Maryland, and needed a VisualWorks demo as part of a retrospective DVD she's putting together. So, we did a short screencast, burned a DVD for her to carry off, and had a nice time doing it. Fun times!

When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label's parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry's songs.

I love Joe Henry, but the price was too high. I replaced him with Shakespeare, whose work (depending on which edition you use) is in the public domain. Mr. Henry's record label may differ, but it's not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here. Were they concerned that readers might have their thirst for Mr. Henry's music sated by that single lyric? Isn't it more likely that his lyric would have enticed customers who otherwise wouldn't have heard of him?

The main problem is that the copyright mavens don't think that far ahead. They think they'll always get the license fee; it doesn't occur to them that the more likely result (as seen above) is that they'll get nothing at all.

The VM selectively re-compiles code to native (Intel) machine-code, based on the size and complexity of the methods, and how often they’re called. This means that the benefits of the new VM vary from task to task, but Andreas Raab estimates that you should expect a 2-3x performance improvement generally, “more towards 2x when running primitive and I/O-bound stuff; more towards 3x when running ‘pure’ Smalltalk code”.

Jerry Kott, one of our WebVelocity developers, has put together a demonstration of the product running on Amazon services. You can watch the video (down converted) below, or grab the high quality version here.

This week, we take a look at the pre-cursor to Objective-C and the foundation of much of modern programming today: Smalltalk-80. One of the men behind the language, Alan Kay, is credited not only with helping to develop the language, but also the invention of object-oriented programming as a concept, and even inventing a personal computer concept that has eerie similarities to the iPad.

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at abstract classes in Smalltalk - in particular, at #shouldNotImplement and #subclassResponsibility. These two methods signal two different things: either a subclass should not implement (or use) some inherited behavior, or a subclass mustimplement a behavior for an inherited method. If you can't watch the YouTube embed below, click here to go to the video now:

Since Borders' store has more than one million titles, there's no shortage of content, even for readers with eclectic tastes. The big question, however, is how Borders will distinguish itself in the e-bookstore war. With three fierce competitors--Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble--already open for business, Borders will need to stir up trouble to lure visitors to its site.

I downloaded the app immediately, but then ran into an all too familiar problem - I registered with Borders eons ago, using my personal email address - but I have no clue what username or password I used. At least they have a retrieval option :)

In a new editorial published in Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet (English translation), the party says that it hopes to host the Bay from servers located within the Swedish Parliament to take advantage of parliamentary immunity. The plan relies on 1) The Pirate Bay agreeing to it and 2) Piratpartiet's performance in the upcoming September elections.

While it sounds clever, it also puts the servers at the mercy of electoral results. You have to admit though - it's a fascinating work around :)

TechDirt points out the absurdity of making it a criminal offence to not read a site's terms of service - this is in regard to ticket scalping/reselling:

This isn't to say that ticket scalpers and resellers who buy up all the tickets aren't necessarily a problem, but should they be criminally liable because they violate a website's terms of service?

While the following example is absurd, it's a good example of just how bad this is:

I could just quickly put up a terms of service that says something as ridiculous as "you must be 8 feet tall to read this website." And, if you're not, you've then violated the terms, and are guilty of criminal hacking under the CFAA -- which could potentially result in jail time.

That's just awesome. It also means that just about every person in the US who has ever visited a website that has TOS is an unindicted criminal...

The San Francisco policy, the result of an executive order from Mayor Gavin Newsom, dictates vending machines on city property can no longer dispense Coke, Pepsi and other calorically sweetened beverages. Sports drinks and artificially sweetened water also are included in the ban.

The problem is this - as these sorts of well intentioned rules multiply, you slowly slide into a pit of soft despotism. Combined with the mania for policy over judgment, it's a recipe for an utterly non-functional society.

stem rust has spread from a corner of Africa’s Great Lakes to countries as distant as Iran and, recently, South Africa. Scientists now fear that the fungus cannot be kept out of Punjab, one of the world’s great bread baskets.

This is the sort of thing that could get very bad while most people are looking elsewhere. Fortunately, the article makes it sound like there are solutions available - so long as irrational fears of GM food don't stop them.

I was on a conference call for almost 90 minutes this morning, so while I was listening, I wrote some more social media link stuff for the blog. Check out the bottom of each post - in addition to the Facebook "Like" button, I've added a Facebook "Share" button, and a Twitter "Tweet This" button.

Of course, those only work if you're on those systems; if you're not, just ignore them :)

OpenLogic's survey found that more than 65 percent of respondents who believed they were not distributing OSS actually were to customers, partners or others. And though 84 percent of all respondents were using OSS in the workplace, only 22 percent were using some sort of tool to determine whether the software they were distributing contained any of that code.

I suspect that the numbers are about the same for all licensing - including code under proprietary licenses. It's just very easy to make copies of anything digital, and the requisite license restrictions are easily lost. That sounds like an argument in favor of DRM, unless you've pondered how useful that's been over time :)

We are pleased to announce that DeepCove Labs are looking for another full-time developer to join our agile team of long time Smalltalk fans. Our primary focus is evolving and maintaining mature industry leading international payment processing platform that we have built from the ground up over the past 10 years as well as developing new and exciting products for financial services industry.

The title - Sh*t My Dad Says
- is more crude than things I usually put on my blog, but it's a hilarious book. Justin Halpern spent a lot of time with his family going back over things his dad had said and done over the years. The result is absolutely hysterical - I read it, my wife read it, and my daughter read it - we all laughed out loud a lot.

Apparently, it all started with a Twitter feed, and grew into a book from that and some of the articles Halpern wrote. There's a lot of vulgarity in the book, so if that offends you, just avoid it. If that's not a problem, go get the book. It's a real hoot, and you'll laugh until it hurts.

On a side note, this is the first book I read on my iPad, and it's hooked me on the device for that purpose. I just grabbed a history book for the device while I sat in the living room. Cheaper than hardback or paperback, and nothing to pile up in my house :)

Well, the mobile space fight between Apple and Google demonstrates why it's so hard for anyone else to get in there: Engadget shows this chart of the extant space of developers:

That overlap - the people developing for the two main platforms - is small. It's likely to stay that way in the short term at least, given Apple's "no cross platform tools" policy. Now imagine you are a third player trying to nose in - Microsoft, HP, whoever - you have to somehow convince people to target a smaller space than the two big players, or offer a way for those people in the middle to add your gadget - all without setting off a reaction from Apple that blows you out of the water (see: Adobe).

This release runs leaner, on at least six Smalltalk platforms and is, I think, easier to learn, easier to use, and easier to extend. Seaside 3.0 is the best platform out there for developing complex, server-side web applications.

I've had some pretty cool looking fireworks lying around for awhile - a friend bought them a few years ago, and thought that there were too many trees in his yard. Tonight, we decided to try them out - my daughter caught some of it using my iPhone. Boy, were they a lot of fun - we had 12 of these rockets to fire out of a small mortar tube:

This week's podcast is part 1 of 2 - Michael and I reviewed a number of packages from the public repository, and this batch - unlike the last one - had comments and usage documentation. We'll have part 2 out next week.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

To listen immediately, use the player below:

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

The podcast is actually edited and ready to go - I'll be pushing it out tomorrow (either pretty early or pretty late, depending on how my day goes). We're having a 4th of July barbecue in the afternoon, so if you don't see it by then, look for it late Sunday night or early Monday morning.

This open letter from Apple may or may not describe what's going on with the new iPhone, but it sure sounds odd:

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

Now, it's not as if I've done studies or anything - so this is all anecdotal. Having said that, I don't recall many calls dropping with my 3g phone while I was just sitting in one place - I've had that happen with the new phone a few times, and yeah - I've been holding it with the left hand at the time. Call me crazy, but that doesn't sound like a software error in signal strength display.

Again, this is all anecdotal - and I know that in the presence of a lot of media coverage of this, I could be falling sway to confirmation bias. Still - that latter just doesn't hold up well for me :)

Things have been a bit quiet here on the blog; there are two reasons for that:

I've got a new project I'm working on (in Smalltalk, of course) with some fellow Cincomers

I've been getting things ready for our 4th of July party

The latter one has consumed the odd hour or two here and there - weeding gardens, buying burgers (have you seen the enormous packages they have at Costco??), and general house cleaning.We're just about ready for the party though - it should be a lot of fun.

The European Commission will ensure that devices with always-on connectivity, like Apple's iPhone, don't lock consumers in to proprietary technology, Neelie Kroes, EU commissioner for the 'Digital Agenda', told EurActiv in an exclusive interview. A yearly scorecard will measure the industry's progress.

I'm not sure how well Apple will deal with this - when Microsoft got run through the wringer back in the 90's, it sure didn't help them much. Worse, I'm not convinced that anything the regulators did helped anyone else, either.

"We believe that the district court's dangerously expansive reading of the liability immunity provisions of the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] DMCA upsets the careful balance struck within the law and is bad public policy," Cary Sherman, RIAA president, wrote in a blog post. "It will actually discourage service providers from taking steps to minimize the illegal exchange of copyrighted works on their sites."

Gosh, the court actually read the law and applied it. Maybe they can order remedial english comprehension for the RIAA.

Randal Schwartz explains why the Squeak license cleanup was so important - it enabled Squeak's entry into the SFC:

This is big. The community has been working towards having the Squeak Project join the SFC for years. And we've finally finished! Through the SFC, we can avoid duplication of legal and administrative services to accept donations and deal with copyright and license issues.

That's pretty cool, and it makes Squeak a more legally "clean" product.